Our first community challenge has come to an end. We would like to thank everyone who participated. There were some very creative and passionate submissions. The tshirts have been mailed off and we hope you like them. Our creative team put together a super cut utilizing some of the videos you submitted.

Our grand prize winners are:

We learned a lot from this first challenge and hope to use what we learned to greatly improve the challenges going forward.

What I liked about this contest is that it cast light on how people make Soylent. I would like to see more about how people integrate Soylent into their lifestyles, like the drummer who went back to playing drums after making it.

@Conor, while I’m thankful for the T-Shirt and stickers, I’m not impressed with how this challenge was run at all. You could have at least posted the results as a link in the original thread. For the amount of production time some of us took to create entries, this little montage video with a whistle is all you do as a response which took you several days to put together?

ALSO… It is awfully frustrating that you “closed” the original thread before anyone could get any feedback from the community on our videos. There was no way for anyone to respond/react to any of them.

We are sending everyone tshirts for participation. We did not use everyone’s footage in the closing video. The closing video was just something we thought would be fun to put together after we saw some of the submissions. I’m sorry if not having your footage included offended you, that was not our intention.

I appreciate any and all feedback. I can unlock the video thread right now, but the idea was to keep new challenges cycling in as community activities. We do not have a large creative team, what did you want as a closing? Had we just announced the winners with no montage video do you feel that would had been better? I want these to be fun and engaging, so feedback helps. But you must understand we are still a relatively small team.

Conor, I think they may just be being divas a little bit. This was obviously just a cool video submission contest that you guys threw together for fun. I think you guys provided everything you promised and much more.

If anyone got their feelings hurt, I would implore them to take a step back and look at the whole thing for what it is and was designed to be. Just smile, have fun, and move on!

I think it is too late to fix the challenge that has already been completed, but here’s what I would have liked to see done differently and perhaps can help in the future:

First of all, time frames should have been specified and stuck to clearly in the contest announcement. Any changes made to time frames if necessary should have been made clearly as well, and included details about how long the voting period would last and when the winners would be announced.

Secondly, I understand your forum software does not allow poll-style questions with embedded videos, but you should have still made a poll with at least all the options listed and the names of the videos or their creators/submitters. As it was done, I had already clicked like on quite a few videos before the voting even began, and therefore was inadvertently voting for all sorts of videos, and was unable to rescind my vote (but i wouldn’t have wanted to take away the Like anyway because I was trying to encourage the people who had submitted.) The way it was done, people were more likely to click like on posts near the top of the thread because the thread was long and rambling with extra comments besides the videos themselves, and someone would have to have been quite dedicated to go through the whole thing and look for each video post. Also, some videos had two separate links so it was unclear which one to click Like on, or which one would be counted. Because the thread was closed, once the submission period ended, no one could receive direct feedback from other members about the videos they had just posted. It would have been nice to be able to respond by hitting reply on a few of them and tell people what we liked.

Thirdly, the announcement closing the contest with the results should have either been amended to the same original post or pinned as a new post. People who had participated in the original thread weren’t “subscribed” to receive a notification about this new Results thread, so the only way someone knows about it is if they monitor the whole forum regularly like I do, or were deliberately coming back to look for it (which was complicated due to the lack of a time frame.)

I appreciate the idea of a montage video but I think it should have been all or nothing or maybe winners only. Somehow a clip from my video got included, but my video was pretty plain and boring compared to my friend @pat_loonytoon’s video which wasn’t featured at all, and I don’t think I saw Nick the puppet guy in there either, if I recall correctly. I might be wrong about that. Some people took quite a bit of time and creativity so leaving out a few while including most just seems like a little bit of a jab against them, even though it probably wasn’t intended that way.

Those are the main concerns I saw. I love the idea of multi-media/social challenges and look forward to participating in the future. I hope things can improve.

I agree completely with your statement about the poll. Using the ‘like’ system was what I thought seemed the best fixed after trying a couple of different polling formats. When we do video based events in the future this will be addressed. As for the closing video I actually had to ask permission from people as we did not want to upset anyone by improperly using their material. I did not anticipate people feeling left out and for that I apologize. With the multiple threads, that is another good point. In the future I’ll look to keep the challenges to one thread with a second only coming about to announce the winners.

With this latest challenge we are experimenting using hashtags as a way to lower the entry on submissions, as not all of the community is on discourse.

The ultimate goal is to have a variety of challenges, something different each month. Sometimes they will be easy to do (like we hope this weeks will be) and other times they will require more effort (the video, which is why we gave all those who participated tshirts).

I really appreciate the feedback Jeff. I hope I do not come off as making excuses, this is a learning process for us as we have just started with the challenges. Thank you.